Thursday, October 30, 2008

The new ML Press just put out 3 new chapbooks by the excellent Ken Baumann, Jimmy Chen, & Shane Jones, each in limited run (Shane's is already gone, sorry, and too bad, because the writing is something new). They are $2, and the others will be gone very quickly.

In the next couple weeks, I will have a thing out in the 2nd grouping with Nick Antosca and Brandi Wells (can we have a gang war?).

My chapbook is IN THE RAPE YEAR OF THE GHETTO TODDLER THE HOUSES WILL AWAKEN.

It's about babies and rape.

Shane Jones said it felt like listening to Slayer.

Other day watched new documentary BILLY THE KID on dvd. It's about a 15 yr old kid who has Asperger's in Maine. It was recommended to me as if GUMMO mixed with NAPOLEON DYNAMITE but was a real person. It was shot using cinema verite so you see the kid in his natural surroundings at school, where he is very awkward. The film does a pretty amazing job of capturing being a young outsider with social anxiety and a want for something in a small town. He says a lot of randomly brilliant shit. It's definitely worth a watch.

I think about TYRANT 5 and my skin turns clear and I can see a bruised dog on my arm meat saying stuff.

I spent a couple hours yesterday reading about Robert Rauschenberg and his becoming as an artist, his years spent studying at Black Mountain (I wish they still had places like this, maybe they do) and hanging out with John Cage, doing weird performances and collage work. Reading his processes and his fuck-all attitude made me want to do more. I want to buy a letter press and make some limited edition books. I want to do

some other shit.

Note to self.

I wrote something that really made me feel nauseated the day before yesterday. I thought, "I am on to it now."

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Keith Montesano wrote a really generous and 'from the gut' review of SCORCH ATLAS in manuscript form, I look fwd to being able to write one in the same vein when Keith's incredible GHOST LIGHTS aka WTF CITY comes out, which I feel will be soon. If there are any publishers reading this who are looking for a killer poetry ms, he is the one to talk to.

For clarity's sake: I don't hate meaning. I hate forced meaning, statically intended meaning, 'themes' 'thematic orchestration' 'this is who my character is' 'forced arcs' 'forced illumination of character's love life history and upbringing, as if we are programmed by what we've done' 'I want to know how this character makes love' No thanks. As if anyone could palpably know something that nobody else knows or has never said enough to say it in a clear way, or by studied evocation. As if all themes haven't been handed to us on plates and again and again and again for years and year. There is a reason you don't watch books on TV.

I enjoy watching THE PICK UP ARTIST 2 & I miss I LOVE MONEY already, I really do.

I am reading, among other things, Robert Pinget's TRIO right now from Dalkey, a French surrealist from the 50's, hung with Robbe Grillet and shit, the intro to the book is all him talking about how writing should be a process of total discovery, and how he refuses to go into his work knowing anything beforehand.

It is a really sexy book, pure black slick cover with nails on it.

TRIO, which is three novellas, I recommend heavily, it's kind of like the post magical realist stuff a lot of people do now, where weird shit happens and its cycled into these crazy offshoots and weird images that begin to tie into one another but in bizarre ways, but mixed with the everyday, a kind of collision of layers, kids vomit jam, boys stuff cucumbers full of explosives and chuck them at people, a guy finds a stairwell on the beach to nothing, but in a metered mind, this paragraph:

"All night long he annotated the text. The next he'd got the formula off by heart. That evening, without even thinking, he recited it. The penknife with which he was about to cut a slice of bread plunged itself, of its own accord, between his two eyes."

All this is in like the first 25 pages, awesome. Way head of its time.

In other news, I am now coediting with Lily Hoang an anthology of innovative writers under 30. Yeah, I know it sucks that you are 30 or more, I am gonna be 30 in a couple months. But I think it's time there was an anthology focusing on really young weird voices. So Lily and I are really excited about this thing. Here's the call (please no personal emails re: this):

Lily Hoang & Blake Butler are now in the early stages of putting together an anthology to feature innovative writers under the age of 30. The anthology has interest from a respected small press.

Please submit no more than 15 pages of prose/poetry/whatever goes to: thirtyunderthirty@gmail.com by January 15. Send as .doc or .rtf attachment. (For truly exceptional cases, we will consider longer submissions.) Previously unpublished work only please. Also, all submissions should be open to editorial review.

We’re looking for the innovative, fresh, exciting writing, and as long as you’re under 30 & doing new things with words, please submit.

We want to find some really crazy shit, form and language innovation is what we're after, so send the weird shit, the new.

Tomorrow or next day will post about publication search history for SA. Thanks to everyone for all the kind words and salutation. It means a lot.

Monday, October 27, 2008

So, it's been a bit in the making, but finally the good news unfolds: SCORCH ATLAS, my novel in stories written mostly in the fall of last year, has been accepted for publication in Fall 09 (projected date 09/09/09) from Featherproof Books. My excitement is past languaging at this point, and only semi-palpable in my forehead. We've already been talking a lot about the design and layout of what the book will be, and already I know this thing is going to be fucking insane as an object, if not also as words.

Here's a copy-style press release from the Featherproof site:

Coming Fall 2009! SCORCH ATLAS is a novel of 14 interlocking stories set in ruined American locales where birds speak gibberish, the sky rains gravel, and millions starve, disappear or grow coats of mold. In 'The Disappeared,' a father is arrested for missing free throws, leaving his son to search alone for his lost mother. In 'The Ruined Child,' a boy swells to fill his parents' ransacked attic. Rendered in a variety of narrative forms, from a psychedelic fable to a skewed insurance claim questionnaire, Blake Butler's full-length fiction debut paints a gorgeously grotesque version of America, bringing to mind both Kelly Link and William Gass, yet turned with Butler's own eye for the apocalyptic and bizarre.

The contents of the book as it stands now contains many stories that have been around in magazines or are about to come out, including the ones from /nor, Ninth Letter, Willow Springs, New York Tyrant, Diagram, Phoebe, Harpur Palate, Barrelhouse, LIT, and several others, though several in altered forms, as well as unpublished stories and other appending craziness forthcoming.

Massive thanks to Zach and Jonathan @ F-Proof for their faith in taking on a wild book of weird stories, and to everyone else who helped this book continue to be something that is now, in another sense, becoming 'real.'

I went the other day to Borders and looked at where the book will sit, that moment felt like warm mold and pudding, in a good way.

Maybe in the mind of Shane Jones's post about the becoming of LIGHT BOXES I will later post my experience of sending this book around, and the process of submitting to small presses, but for now I am going to go for a run in the cold.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

burrito life / read some story to some toddlers today about a witch / half-zonked on nothing and went to the bathroom to stand at the sink

bleach on tshirts n shit

two stories read yesterday, intuition over meaning:

Evan Lavender-Smith's AT THE CORE: God, this exactly what I want to read, ever, 'layers upon layers,' aura. I wish more people used aura in the way as here with this story,

I feel drunk writing from the snot in my head though I have hardly drunk any now in three weeks

Jane Unrue's A NEW POSITION FOR THE LOWER LIP: I read all of ATLASSED in one sitting finally yesterday and tonight in one long paragon of sick, this book I had bought after having bought it from reading her bits I think in Unsaid, like magic, 'understander of rooms'

as well yesterday got another blurb in from one of my most revered for EVER, my head is headed

tonight the air is back in forth in thin and fat

submit to lamination colony quick for next issue tc boyle sent language poetry no kidding, it's about the slurge of peepers

i love that t.c. boyle story where the kid becomes obsessed with listening to audio tapes of bees, and the one where the woman is leaving the water on in the house, why didn't those win the prizes, had he not been in harper's by then or some shit

oh yeah saw Rauan Klasnik read at Emory few days ago, from his book of prose poems HOLY LAND that came out a bit ago from Black Ocean, I read the book twice yesterday while on an exercise bike, it is brutal and new in its brutality I think, and of a mind, here are some of the poems, during the reading he seemed to both be reading and talking to the audience off the paper in one flood, it was stretchy, he read a list of words he had said during the reading while he was reading, something like: fuck (4) cunt (2) god (7) light (9) church (4) etc., then went back to reading, i was busy watching the face of the brother of the young asian lady who read before him, his face remained in one position somewhat akin to smile glazed for the whole reading, klassnik mentioned 'white dogshit' and afterwards i told him we need more dogshit in language, i don't know if he thought i thought he thought i thought

Thursday, October 23, 2008

I've gotten I think 3 personal rejection letters in the last few days, all three posing a similar question: how is this connected to the real world?

I am not phased in any way by rejections anymore, if anything I like them, honestly, especially when they say things.

One of the letters said this: "... the general consensus here was that it was a thing with too many layers, layers upon layers, and the process was more of a process of peeling them away to get to the meaning. Not a bad thing in itself, of course, so long as it's part of a process of meaning... "

Process of meaning. Meaning. I don't know. Why did the dog shit into the cantaloupe in this scene? What does the dog shitting into the cantaloupe say about our lives, in this day now?

Equally: What does a guy going to a store and meeting a woman mean? What does a character realizing he has cancer mean? How directly should a layer be connected to another layer in order for the idea to be clear?

A better question: why does something in a book have to be speaking to our lives?

What if the author doesn't know and doesn't want to know?

What can be said that isn't speaking to a life in some way, outside of pure aasdhfoasydoriuaoduri gibberish?

Though I honestly have felt affected by asiodfhjasidfyoaiudyfiu more than, say, books where every action has a reaction and each move is eventually understood.

I think too many movies and Flannery O'Connor prize winning books and so on have milked the idea of text as life replication object or motive opener into something very restrictive and dangerous really, at least in certain forums.

I'm not talking about 'experimental' literature here, or making an argument against narrative, per say, but more wondering what certain types of motives and expectations are for in fiction.

Is the reader working to connect the 'meaning' bad?

Is unclear meaning, rendered well, not desired?

Layers upon layers

Recently, when Johannes Goransson read here in Atlanta, he read part of a text that said, specifically, 'NARRATIVE = DEATH,' referring to tag line for a Godard film in the poem. The other reader who read with Johannes, Chris Bundy, a more narrative-interested guy who seemed a bit edged by reading after Johannes (who wouldn't?) specifically referred to that moment before he began with his story. He asked Johannes if that's what he'd said, and Johannes agreed, adding 'I didn't say I was right.'

Chris's story then ended in several people in the narrative dying.

I don't believe the idea that 'every story has been told,' I've never read a story about a hermaphrodite with lesions over his eyes opening a bakery in Cabbagetown GA and starting his own branch of young female club to compete with Girl Scouts, while in the evenings going to a bridge parlor to expose himself to old women. I also feel, though, that if that story, as ridiculous or 'irreal' as it is, isn't told using words that do something in and of themselves, 'sentences,' then you aren't saying anything at all.

And yet, too, there can be things that happen, tangentially even, in stories or what have you, that have no referendum, no ulterior zoning, etc. They are words, the words themselves, as fractal moments or as ant heads in an enormous anthill, say something in a few words that open only for there, then, and are finished. And that is all they should be, to expound on them would be to beat their cheeks.

This second letter excerpt is from a friend, so I feel slightly attenuated in posting it, but I have absolutely no hard feelings, so hopefully the editors won't either, the piece that was sent was an excerpt from a larger thing that probably did not stand alone, and regardless, it doesn't matter, I am just thinking aloud here:

"For instance, when the birds become pillows, what does this really offer the reader? It's a lovely image, but what real-world parallel is there for us to come away with?"

I don't know, what does the birds becoming pillows offer? What else should be said?

Why can't a bird made into a pillow just be a bird pillow?

Why can't a forehead be slathered in bacon grease while the narrator stands in the hotel mirror with the three babies on the bed behind him, without needing to know that the narrator is undergoing chemo and feels an emotional ennui?

It is dangerous and reckless I think to think that all narratives, or even realistic or connective narratives, are ones that have a palpable link to real life, real moments, the real.

I say this completely outside my own writing, my own taste even, I think.

Like, what is really real brah?

Like, what is human n shit?

'Ulysses posted the photos of his mother's liver surgery to his blog and turned around to touch the bright blue sore on the window through which the morning had begun to splatter glue.'

I am excited about the upcoming issue of Unsaid, it seems like an answer to some of this, it has some really recent surrealist stuff from me, and I have noticed several really incredible others that will be in it: Scott Garson, Rachel B. Glaser, Peter Markus, Kristina Born (K. had sent the piece to No Colony also we were about to accept it, it is amazing, fuck). It seems like the issue will be big, like the other issues, that could be laid on an operating bed and young children sent in to see the book.

I started off to write this blog with a clear point but then having a clear point about writing fiction that doesn't have a clear point seems pointless and like a dick in the eye.

Here's something real that happened to me on Monday: In the cemetery down the street from my house the other day there was a grave that was swarmed with daisies, I mean the plot was big as a king sized bed and the daisies had grown up waist high on it, covering every inch of the plot, there were hundreds of bees.

I want my headstone to say something like 'He dun fucked up.' or 'This would be a good place to take a piss.'

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Last night I sat down to start reading Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR, the other of the two debut books from Ellipsis Press along with Eugene Marten's WASTE, which I loved and talked about a while back, I hadn't meant to read for very long but found myself unable to stop reading the book. FOG & CAR is a strange amalgam of several ideas, it begins with a dissolved marriage from which both ends begin to branch and splinter and spread back into each other in weird ways. I was surprised to be so captivated by a book about a ruined marriage, which it is only on the surface, what it really is is a puzzle and a book of worming forms, sometimes the tense shifts or lines are layered and/or repeated, there is a lot of subtle innovation, refreshing.

The first section uses these calm and almost Lutz-like renditions of the two divorcees, Fog and Car, trying to smooth their lives out into something, Eugene Lim writes about the cleaning of houses, the method of a swimming routine, and all in this meditative, language-conscious but not overtly languaged and extremely absorbing way, the book also continues to evolve by stretching the forms of the way the words are delivered, but again, in calm and nuanced methods.

In grad school Amy Hempel had us read a Mark Richard story, I can't remember the name of it, I think it is the first one in THE ICE AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WORLD, Amy, in perhaps her only 'lecture-like moment' of the workshops talked some about how Richard was able to show the passage of time by using fields and dogs rather than talking about time, and how it opened the language and the feel of the words in this surprising way, I think Eugene Lim's descriptions here worked on me in that way, though rather than over the function of time it was over the function of distancing and grief, so much so that I couldn't stop wanting to propel through it, and I was so pleased to find myself reading a book supposedly about relationships about still feeling completely engrossed, as I hate relationships in books usually, for their wheel-spinning, I think people who get excited about Richard Yates would really enjoy the meditative stancing of the early sections especially.

Then there are two more sections in which Lim continues to open the way the story is built into an almost Paul Auster kind of maze, path-inducing manner, there is following and weird rooms and strange phenomenon that continue to be braided together but left open in other strands.

Here is a sentence from the book that maybe exhibits the balance of strange and familiar sense of both situation and language in FOG & CAR: "He forgot his name and became her bellybutton."

Then, in the last third of the book, which begins to develop into a really strange configuration of earlier elements and a linking of space, I hit a page, a strange development involving a man in an empty room and an elevator, and a little later, further linking, which made me stop and touch the book against my chest. I remember not knowing what to do having read it, it was very late by then and I'd stayed up longer than I meant to, and yet I wanted to keep reading, and yet couldn't the page had stopped me in a way that I felt I needed to think about rather than go on with the rest of the book right there, I went to bed. I could not stop thinking about the book in such a way that I stayed awake for several further hours, and when I finally did sleep I had a dream about writing about the book as I am now, and other dreams branching off from the book. When I woke I walked around for a while and then finished reading.

FOG & CAR is new in familiar ways and familiar in new ways, and altogether a thing that turned my mind on in such a mode that I could not turn it off.

Along with WASTE, if you haven't gotten on board already, both are available from Ellipsis as a package deal. I can't imagine an innovative fiction press with a better introductory one-two punch.

Right before I woke up for the last time this morning, I had a dream where Marilyn Manson was talking to me, he was speaking a quote, the quote, I knew somehow, was from someone named 'Vivino', talking about chess strategy, which Manson was applying to something about writing he and I had been talking about, I have no idea why I was talking to Marilyn Manson about writing, the quote was, "Begin with a false position & allow the position to become." This may become the epigram for RICKY'S ANUS, which I am deep in. Deep in Ricky's Anus.

I got a galley of Jesse Ball's new forthcoming novel THE WAY THROUGH DOORS in the mail today. Fuck yeah.

There is a new issue of BUST DOWN THE DOOR AND EAT ALL THE CHICKENS, I have a story in it, as does Sam Pink, Ofelia Hunt, Mike Young, Matthew Simmons, D. Harlan Wilson, Darby Larson and several others, I can't wait to read it, the cover is amazing. Thanks to Bradley Sands for his hard work and wild mind.

The issue is only $5 plus a little shipping, 'the squarest price in town.'

Sunday, October 19, 2008

A: Anne Frank had large rivets in her skull cut from where while she lay in the womb her mother had smoked 'skonk,' Anne Frank's mother was heavy into the late 1920's Manchester black metal scene and had imprinted a large tattoo of a jackrabbit on her hind ass, as a result Anne Frank was capable of storing vast quantities underneath her hair that in her younger forgetful years she would often forget about until the taffy or goose fur or tea leaves she'd shoved inside herself had begun to rot and grow mold, it was because of the blue mold off a certain early kind of Triscuit that Anne Frank lost most of the vision in her right eye and often would faint without warning when she heard certain tones from birds, Anne Frank's favorite food was Gugg, Gugg was a brief-lived creation of a Scottish marketing firm determined to resell their own detritus to the consumptive public, the food of Gogg contained the eyelashes, sore sports, scabs, lice, pubic hair, teeth strippings, sleep rot, and various other orifical crud, the crud was packaging into a bright brown mass that resembled hashbrowns and smelled like bees, Anne Frank would eat Gogg until her mother touched her face and said an incantation, Anne Frank's whole head during the period she remained hidden in the cupbourd was lined with Gogg from inch to inch, so thick so that she could not feel herself thinking, could not feel her insides absorbing the Gogg into her brain, in certain early editions of her diaries, the phrase Gogg, or some derivative blather conjured by the post-hypnotic effects of its consumption, is mentioned every third word, such that famous sections such as: "I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway. I'll just let matters take their course and concentrate on studying and hope that everything will be all right in the end." in their initial format read: "I've Gogged the smeepie where I hardly borshbum Gogg I Gogg or Gogg. The neepy-nee-naw will keep on Goggsleereening without me, and Gog can't Gog anything to Gog lissmissum anyGogg. I'll just Gogg matters Gogg their leiffumwitzis and ictrerunnum on Gogg and Gogg Gogg Gogg will Gogg all Gogg in the nordvunt." The edition commonly known as 'The Diary of Anne Frank' was then mostly generated in a post-trauma legal battle between the Frank estate and Gogg Inc., which was finally settled in that Gogg Inc. agreed to 'correct' the final work of the passed daughter surreptitiously and without credit, the production of which by and large directly led to Gogg Inc.'s financial ruin and subsequent dissolution.

Does anyone know a good printer who does very short run products? Like 100-200 copies of small things, nice, perfect bound, cheap?

Finalizing proofs on EVER, Derek's art for this thing is gorgeous and perfect, he will be running some previews of the art on his blog I think in the near future, and maybe an excerpt on the new web version of Sleepingfish, which I am already vastly enjoying in its web nature, another node. Looking like it might be released before the year is out, or by my birthday in January at the latest. Finalizing now and blurb collection, Ethan Hawke has been tapped.

I finally uploaded the video of us doing Sam Pink's A PLAY FOR TWO PEOPLE at the No Colony reading in Atlanta. My camera is really old so it makes a little clicking sound sometimes, and it is kind of dark in the room, but otherwise it came out okay I think.

Fuck Sam Pink.

For the next five people who order No Colony with the note 'fuck sam pink' included I will include an extra book from a pile of good books, that offer is good through Friday.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

At my part time job at this public art gallery this week I got asked to judge a contest called Reflections, it is done every year in Georgia, I did it when I was in elementary school or something, kids enter for their school and then the winners go on to compete at state level I think, I was judging 6/7/8th grade writing. The theme of the contest this year was 'Wow!' which is a pretty bad topic, most of the kids writing either ended with the word 'wow' or was about a time a kind of weather made them saw wow, one kid included the Flavor Flav 'wowwwww' in a rap he wrote, it talked about him getting emails from girls, the majority were either about sports or 9/11 or weather.

This one kid, I read his story, it was untitled, it is the most insane thing I've read in a long time, it had all this-meta stuff going on, the narrator gets sucked into a muffin and fights Simon Cowell and switches dialects while referring to how he's switching dialects, one of the dialects is 'olde english,' the British people say 'wot wot,' at one point a nerd kills another person by reciting the periodic table in order and it lists out the elements, there is a number that takes up a whole paragraph, the kid uses the word 'octosyllabic' and 'razor-backed,' one of the characters is a 'mattress named Zem born on the plant Sqornshellous Zeta,' another character is 'Bob the multicolored brown clown wig,' holy crap, I would publish this story in a real magazine, if I read it in a real magazine I would say holy shit, I am having trouble believing the kid is 11, but I am also having trouble believing if a parent wrote a story for a kid they would be this balls-out about it, because it's fucking insane.

Anyway, what I'm saying is, the best story I've read since Rachel B. Glaser's PEE ON WATER is 'untitled' by this 11 year old from Alpharetta GA, I may see if I can publish this. I want to like call the parents and tell them their kid is brilliant or they are liars, I don't know, it put me in a good mood.

While I was at work I was reading Sam Pink's YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE, I had it out on the desk, I am allowed to do whatever I want at work, I just have to be there, I had the chapbook on the table, this nine year old kid was hanging around waiting for his mom, this kid talks a lot and says crazy shit whenever he comes in, his mom brings him by a lot, the kid saw Sam's chapbook and said out loud the title, "YUM YUM I CAN'T WAIT TO DIE"? Then he looked at me weird and said, "That's kind of stupid." in this incredulous way, I was afraid he was going to pick up the book and see curse words and things about having orgasms, he didn't, then he started repeating the phrase, "I'm not the only thing you can't stop." over and over and over again while he played with these poetry magnets on a file cabinet to spell out some sentence about MR. REAGAN AND MR. GORBECHEV doing something weird to a POTATO and HIS HEAD, I wish I had the sentence, kids are cool, I like other people's kids.

I am reading Nick Antosca's new novel MIDNIGHT PICNIC, it is brilliant, it is like CHILD OF GOD and William Gay but updated and easier to read, and really really fucking heavy, and with sex, I love it so far, I will have a review coming soon, it is coming out at the end of this month from IMPETUS PRESS.

I hate that if I don't drink a pot of coffee every day now I feel like my head is being crushed by rocks.

Last night I dreamed I had a CD slimline case full of the first disc of Smashing Pumpkins MELON COLLIE AND THE INFINITE SADNESS, there were like 19 of them, the disc with red smiling sun on it, the rest of the cd case was empty, I can't remember anything else.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

Tonight in Atlanta we are launching the first reading of Solar Anus reading series, flagstone spoken into by the magnificent JOHANNES GORANSSON and local novelist CHRIS BUNDY, the event is an early one 6 PM at Beep Beep Gallery off Ponce, this will be a monthly thing from here on out though future extension will be likely at a later time and at a more regular venue. If you ever want to come to Atlanta or are coming to Atlanta and want to read, we'd likely love to have you.

The trains outside my apartment today are really loud, it sounds like something metal is being ripped to shreds.

After I typed that the sound stopped.

All I have been able to think about lately is Ricky's Anus. The book is at 31k words now, I think the current section I am writing, Ricky's Blood, is going to be one very long unbroken graph that will maybe last 1/3rd of the book, this book is going to be long, I am sorry I mentioned I was thinking about deleting it, that probably wouldn't happen, I am not massive in that sense, I am done thinking about it outside the moment. I feel really strangely electric and I am not sure why and I will keep it that way by shutting my mouth quick.

I randomly happened on rereading William Gass's afterward to one of my favorite books OMENSETTER'S LUCK, I had forgotten there was an afterword, in it Gass discusses how he had written a different version of the book which had been stolen, and so he proceeded in despair to reconstruct and rewrite: the afterword also contains meditations on his 8 years of rejection before publication arose, grappling with a text's destruction, the feeling of 'why the hell am I going through all the trouble for this?,' and a lot of other things that have seemed central to my mind lately. It is a fantastic little essay.

Here is a section on his rewriting the book:

During the months that followed, I rewrote Omensetter's Luck as if in a series of trances which I almost systematically entered. I sometimes felt I was recovering the lost text exactly, not by trying to remember what it had been originally or how I'd written it, but by becoming weary--weary and unthinking, weary and unfeeling too--eventually so deep in the mine of my past work that the mine worked me.

Wearing, unthinking, unfeeling: it's funny, why does that seem to be a fruitful state? I am deep in something, I'm not sure

You can read the brief Afterword in whole here on Google, and I recommend OMENSETTER'S LUCK as highly as I can recommend something.

I am reading THE LONG TRIAL OF NOLAN DUGATTI by Stephen Graham Jones, according to the acknowledgments I think he wrote the book in 72 hours, it is about a man who works at a helpline for a video game no one ever plays and whose father wrote him a series of suicide notes, failed, I should go finish the book, next I am reading Eugene Lim's FOG & CAR which I am excited about after WASTE and having read the first few setions of FOG & CAR in anticipation.

Interior layout on EVER is in study-mode, we are reaching finalization periods, I hope to spend the rest of the weekend proofing and proofing and proofing, there is something about the final stamp of what words a book will be made of that makes me both anxious and excited and maybe nervous some, like I am going to miss something that I will see the first time I read the book in print that will make me cringe, it seems no matter how many times you look at something over and over and over something new wrong grabs you, I don't want to feel that, I will keep working.

i had a dream about babies being destroyed the past two nightsi should stop talking shit about babies when i am awake

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

can somebody who is good at drawing draw me a drawing of a minivan swarmed with flies, i mean swarmed so tightly you can hardly tell its a minivan anymore, i would like the flies to have lots of colors and be of different sizes, if someone did this and did it well i would find a way to compensate them i would draw a painting with my dick at least

one time i really did a painting with my dick, i painted on a large thick cardstock sheet i got at walmart really late one night, i often used to go to walmart alone and look around, i did not feel strange, i like the TVs they leave on silent in a long row, i like how you can just keep walking in one kind of light for as long as you want and you don't have to talk to anyone, when i did the painting i had on this song on a john zorn record where this man and woman are screaming at each other in a violent manner, i painted with my semi erect penis, at other times it was full i'm sure, i am sorry for telling you this i just thought about it, the painting wasn't very good, it did have a lot of color going for it, i'll tell you that, i still have it somewhere, maybe it could be brought to public auction, then i'd have enough money to buy a staplegun again

i am feeling destructive today i think i am going to give up something i love

OR AT LEAST SOMETHING I LIKE A LITTLE

this crying buddha statue looks like he is giving himself head

i think a lot about the painting of the raped woman inside the guns n roses album that eventually got edited out, i remember a kid in my class showing me the picture on our way to see the king ramses exhibit of all the stuff his family or whoever had thought would be good to have around him endless years

and i don't want to get inside of cars anymore

and i never feel clean shaven even right after i have shaved

today i said out loud that i understand why Wallace killed himself, i don't know why i thought i couldn't understand it, i understand it completely, i don't feel depressed because of or inside of saying that, i just understand why he could see the need to do it

typing is hard work

i think people i know in real life think i don't work very much

i am considering that when i finish the next novel i am working on, which will be a long while from now, that i will delete it, i had thought about just not sending it anywhere, but now i think i like the idea of deleting it entirely without backup, first when the first draft is done i want to spend 500-800 hours editing and making every line right with an excess tenacity in which i shirk to a large extent the other things in life i should be paying more attention to, i want to spend more time in the revision process than i have spent on all other things of me combined, and then when it is done, then when it is exactly as i wanted and new, drag it to the trashcan and hear the computer make the crinkle sound as it is permanently erased

the sound of that sound might be the greatest thing in life

or that might really be exciting

like finding a room off the first legend of zelda where there is a window to an all blue room with a table set for dinner in it, and then you eat

or like a duck who winks and lifts his wing to reveal a woman

and how my cell phone keeps taking pictures of nothing, like several a day, so that when you go to look at the photo archive there are just all these little black squares and my cell phone's memory gets fat full and no one can send me messages, most of which i don't want anyway

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

The late summer issue of LAMINATION COLONY is now live. It features a bit of a shift or facelift or something, I updated the archives and submission policy, etc., for the first time in years.

This issue means a lot to me, I am very excited about it, I has a bit of a shift of energy or something, it has more new work in it than any issue in past, as well as longer work, and of a more hyper array.

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Q: what is wrong when there is little white pellets coming out of the vagina

A: Initiated to American Markets in fall of 1968 via hypodermic injection pronged on the back of miniature plastic horses inserted in a certain now-defunct brand of chocolate breakfast cereal, the bacterial weapon Noadsditzbleebdacht Unbeewboid Oftt Krissit, also known in various urban outlets as 'Krackerz,' 'Noder's Dysfunction,' and 'the Slip,' is a semi-common side-effect of hormonal discharge most often found in women aged 3 to 33. While mostly confined to female homeowners within a one-mile radius of Bojangles restaurants, the strain has also been located in anterior regions of upper Iowa and the undercity alleys of Scranton, and should be treated immediately on contact by telling absolutely no one one. A warm dishtowel slathered in baking grease and sandwich squeeze-outs should be rolled into a cone and inserted in the vaginal opening while standing in the sunlight of the largest room in the homeowner's home; if the vaginal opening has become too overloaded with pelletry, the anal cavity can be alternatively acquiesced, though the size of the towel should be upped to 'beach,' and should be fully lodged inside the body for proper effect. Because the state is highly conductive, the sufferer should immediately procure safe vessel in the form of outdated sportscar or Styrofoam cooler emblazoned with Dallas Cowboys logo, the lining properties of which have been said to increase vagina curing. All liquids should be avoided for 8 to 80 hours while giving the vagina a chance to 'chill out,' and further liquid consumption, AKA 'asking for it' may cause the vagina to become engorged, and in some cases has proved to produce resin and/or salt water taffy and/or fleshy material easily mistaken for ankle socks. If after 180 hours the pellets still appear, acquire a medium to large sized window dressing from local funeral home, deep fry, and mail to your mother. Other related side effects include anal branding, blood hiccups, accelerated Spam email incursion, hypnosis caused by auditory intake of the word 'beeper,' nasal swelling, and an increased desire to play jacks on a uptown-bound city bus.

Matt Kirkpatrick, of Barrelhouse/FC2, has initialized a new web lit journal: IMPROBABLE OBJECT, the first issue is me, Justin Taylor, and Davis Schneiderman, the site looks beautiful, I like it, I like Matt, congrats to him on being mentioned in Notable Nonrequired Stories of 2008. Thank you Matt.

Today I have eaten mostly only peanut m/m's, baklava, and a fucklot of coffee, my brain aches. Help me stop coffee.. Concentrating is hard. I promise myself I am going to concentrate a lot this week and focus and not drink beer, I don't know why I need to do that, yes I do, I have been feeling a lot lately like 'I want to do something but I don't know what I want to do but it's not read or write,' then after I spend forever working myself up into it I feel happy and enjoy, RICKY'S ANUS is like 23k words now, today I wrote about Ricky's thumbnail or something, I want to publish RICKY'S ANUS sentence by sentence, no stories or excerpts, just sentences, maybe I will send out some sentences, they are mostly long runons. Right now I feel too full, I am always hungry until I eat to the point of too full now, tonight I will watch the finale of I LOVE MONEY, I like watching I LOVE MONEY, after it is over we are canceling our cable, I feel good about it, maybe I'll rejoin Netflix, though usually I feel like there's nothing left I want to see

Thursday, October 2, 2008

also now No Colony's website got updated, it has info about the new issue, it has an excerpt from the issue in the form of Sean Kilpatrick's story HUBBY, which really by now I have read 8-22 times, Sean is doing new things with words

there are also two previously unpublished and really cool pieces by Corey Zeller and Patrick Leonard, I really like the pieces on the site, please continue to buy issues, we love your knee

Sean Kilpatrick and I are slowly rewriting NAKED LUNCH together, for serious, wait till you see it, Sean is my abuse brother, something is alive inside him, he is eating the toothpaste rotting in my colon

i got a review copy of Lily Hoang's forthcoming book from Fairy Tale Review Press, it is called CHANGING, i literally when i took it out of the envelope said, Fuckin wow, it is a beautiful beautiful book, the style of the interior is like a puzzle, wait till you see this thing, Lily is the shit, I will have a review and more words about the book later, but Joyelle McSweeney's blurb on the back says a lot: "This is an impossible thing, a dream object." it really is

my review of Norman Lock's ebook GRIM TALES is in the Oct issue of the Believer, I mentioned this on HTML Giant, it seems this issue is a semi-Lish themed issue, it has a Diane Williams interview by Kevin Sampsell that I am excited to read, it has pieces with Will Eno and David Ohle, some other

a corresponding interview I did with Mr. Lock will be on Hobart before year's end, Norman Lock talks about his work with a pointed intelligence he is a wise man, and wow.

Derek sent me a potential cover for EVER, I cried a little, Derek is too good for me to say anything else

according to a mention in this piece on Michael Kimball's amazing DEAR EVERYBODY, i am a powerhouse international literary agent who represents Nobel winners, that is good to learn, i am not seeking unsolicited submissions because I am sort of a cunt, also Michael Kimball is Das Kapital, what more could I need

the current background on my laptop is a house on fire from a Tarkovsky film, before that it was a photo of a Chihuahua standing on hamburgers, i miss my dog, i want to be my dog and/or this dog